


Something

by Setcheti



Series: Tremors: the Subtext [9]
Category: Tremors: The Series
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new mutation is terrorizing the valley...and it eats meat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something

There was something out there.

Burt couldn’t have explained to anyone how he knew, or even what exactly it was he knew except for just knowing that somewhere out there in the valley something dangerous was lurking.  Lurking and waiting for an opportunity to present itself.

Given the nature of most ‘somethings’ in Perfection, opportunity usually looked like a heedless tourist, or sometimes like a careless rancher.  Burt had gotten used to that, had in fact practically spent his whole adult life preparing for dealing with it…but he still didn’t like it.  In spite of what he told other people, he personally considered death to be a pretty high price to pay for stupidity.  And he did his best to make sure people who wandered into his territory didn’t get stuck with that particular bill.

Some of them slipped past him, though.  Burt kept a list, for practical as well as maudlin reasons, and right now he had a feeling he was going to be adding a line to the list sometime soon.  It might be a name and address, copied from a bloody driver’s license; it might be a description of a mangled corpse that hadn’t had the good fortune to retain its identification.  One line in particular only stated the size and brand of a running shoe along with a note that the victim had been hang gliding.

One line was Hector’s, another Walter Chang’s.  Burt had all the victims who’d been residents of Perfection highlighted…and he was hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be highlighting another name this time.

 

A week went by, then another.  Larry came back from one of his scavenging hikes and reported coming across a spot that looked like something had been in a clawing mood:  torn-up vegetation, broken scrub branches, scratched and gouged earth…and blood, spattered across it all.  Something had been hunting.  A little bit of fur and some droppings he’d found in the same place indicated that the victim had only been a jackrabbit, but when Burt and Tyler had driven out to investigate the size of the claw marks belied the comfortable idea that the Something was only jackrabbit-hunter size.  In one place the claw gouges in the hard earth were three inches deep and showed a talon-like curve.  And the lack of tracks anywhere else told them the Something had to have dropped down from the sky.  Whatever it was, it was big, it ate meat…and it could fly.

Tyler radioed out a warning to everyone in the valley who had their CB on while Burt drove back to town as fast as he could.  They’d marked the site with red flags and a radio transmitter so Casey and Roger could find it, but it was important for them to get back to Perfection.  There hadn’t been anything around that could fly since Messerschmitt, the escaped Ass-Blaster from Vegas, and most of the security precautions they’d implemented in town had to do with ground threats and insects.  Flying things necessitated different weapons, different tactics, and more vigilance.

Burt increased the number of patrols they were doing, but they no longer went out alone or patrolled outside of town after dark; correspondingly, Tyler quietly and without fuss cancelled his night tour and refused to reinstate it even in the face of one tour group who offered him a thousand dollars and a handful of notarized releases.  Twitchell came out, made as much of a report as he could out of the sparse information and left again with a few half-serious threats in his wake – he wanted whatever it was taken care of, but he didn’t want to fill out any death reports either.  And all over Perfection and the surrounding valley, people kept one eye on the hot blue sky when they went out and filled rifles with scattershot that offered more chance of grounding an airborne predator than a hastily fired bullet could.

The next victim was a sheep, no scrawny yearling but a fat, healthy ewe.  Another sheep was plucked up two days later, and after the sheep farmer pulled his stock in the remains of a slain steer were found.  Burt concluded with no little relief that the half-ton steer had been too big for their Something to lift, and after examining the mangled mess left behind Casey had been able to add to that the idea that maybe the creature’s talons were oversized compared to its body.  It was also starting to look like whatever it was was nocturnal, since all the attacks seemed to be happening at night, and the valley’s residents relaxed their daytime vigilance somewhat.

Burt and Tyler didn’t, though.  There was still no way of knowing what kind of creature it was or how many of them there might be, and the idea that they might not be willing to go after large prey had been squashed by the half-ton dead steer.  The two men set up cameras in likely places, cameras that were motion-activated and equipped for taking pictures in the dark…but so far, they hadn’t gotten lucky yet.

And the next time they came by the lab to report their lack of photographic evidence, they found out just how unlucky they were.  Cletus had been camped out at the lab, studying DNA traces with Casey while Roger was in the city, and his analysis had revealed that the DNA trace elements they’d been hoping were cross-contamination from the scene and didn’t actually belong to the creature…actually did.  “Part bat,” he told Burt, once he’d stopped swearing over his microscope.  “And part iguana, some coyote, and a God-damned roadrunner is in there too.  I suppose I we should just be glad nothing poisonous got mixed in like a rattlesnake or a gila monster, that would have been a whole lot worse.”

“So what made it so huge?” Tyler wanted to know.  “Except for the coyote all those things are pretty small.”

“Dormant DNA strains,” Casey answered before Cletus could.  “Mixmaster doesn’t always activate what we’d think of as the definitive segments in the DNA structure, it seems to pick and choose.”

“That’s exactly what it does,” the old scientist agreed, sitting down on a stool and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.  “We created it that way to make it a better tool, and in a lab under controlled conditions it isn’t a problem because which sequences to use are picked out beforehand.  But now…”

“Now that it’s running amok all over the valley it’s picking sequences at random,” Casey filled in.  “Which is why most of the mutations don’t survive.”

“Like the Wormhoppers.”  Tyler grimaced ever so slightly when he said the little doomed creatures’ name and shook his head at Burt.  “Too bad we can’t convince Mixmaster to make better choices.”

Cletus cracked a lopsided half grin.  “I’m working on it,” he said.  “It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but maybe eventually between this young lady and I we can create a counteragent.”

Burt just nodded; he knew Cletus had been thinking about a way to deactivate the Mixmaster contamination in the valley ever since Tyler had gotten sick from the mutated pollen.  “So is there anything you can tell us that might help us track down these things?”

“Nothing you didn’t already know.”  Cletus shrugged.  “We need more to work with if we’re going to really figure out what’s going on.”

“A whole specimen would be nice,” Casey added.

“Just as long as you don’t expect us to bring one in alive,” Tyler told her.  He stood up, stretching.  “I mean, it’s a carnivorous coyote lizard that can fly, and it’s big enough to take down a longhorn.  You _don’t_ expect us to bring it in alive, right?”

Casey immediately shook her head, even though she had thought of it.  “Pieces will be fine.”

Burt stood up too, decisively, sliding his glasses back on.  “We can do pieces.”


End file.
